BOOKS IN BRIEF: FICTION & POETRY

By Stephen Burt

Published: November 9, 2003

THE HIDDEN MODEL

By David Yezzi.

Triquarterly/Northwestern University, cloth, $39.95; paper, $11.95.

From St. Paul's dome in London to San Francisco's Seal Rocks, from a Rembrandt print to a grave among ''soggy hills,'' the expertly formal verse of David Yezzi's first book of poems looks hard at things and places he has seen: his solemn lines and often unrhymed stanzas reveal a poet sometimes too careful for his own good. Well-grounded in older verse from the 17th century to the 1950's, Yezzi's language shows his own commitment to the self-discipline that his poems about actors and painters describe. Yezzi, the director of New York's influential 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center, shows particular skill in depicting cities and seashores: poems set near oceans range from slight lyric sketches to the ambitious, well-handled ''Casco Passage,'' commemorating a friend lost at sea. ''Aporias'' takes us to Manhattan, where ''Along the Hudson, fog dissolves our sight, / like sugar broken up in lukewarm tea.'' To balance these poems' focus on disillusion and fact, Yezzi takes up the intangibles of religious belief. ''The Graven Image,'' for example, concerns a smudged apartment window in which pious onlookers saw the face of Christ. Yezzi's authoritative voice can turn pretentious, and its sternness makes his lighter verse (''Upon Julia's Breasts'' is about one of Julia Child's recipes for chicken breasts) not as much fun as it might have been. He offers neither fireworks nor airy lightness; his elements are water and earth -- locality, gravity and mortality -- and with them he has made some durable poems. Stephen Burt